


normal

by beardsley



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2013-08-04
Packaged: 2017-12-22 10:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/912073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beardsley/pseuds/beardsley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are monsters inside Mako's head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	normal

**Author's Note:**

> This story crawled straight out of the depths of my id, and my id? Is a dark place. THIS IS A VERY CREEPY, UNHAPPY FIC FROM START TO FINISH. Please heed the warnings.

She dreams. Everybody does. She reads about the stages of sleep; she reads about the stages of sleep deprivation, too, because she's a fifteen-year-old girl and she keeps seeing her mother's corpse torn to shreds on the insides of her eyelids. As months and years pass the images start to twist and change, and even if intellectually she knows her mother died instantly when her neck was broken in her dreams Mako hears her screaming for hours as the kaijuu rips her limbs from her body. Sometimes it's Mako who mutilates her, her jaw aching and throat parched from hoarse animal growls.

When she wakes up she expects to see her hands red with blood up to the elbows, but they're always just clammy with sweat and in the dark Mako knows she's alive.

She reads about what would happen to her if she stopped sleeping. She reads about trauma. She reads, because she hates talking to people at the Academy. Their accents are all strange and her English is good, but it's not good enough to feel natural. Stacker is the only one who speaks Japanese fluently. Mako reads and she studies and she's at the top of her class, but she doesn't know anyone in her class by first name. In turn they all call her the Tokyo girl.

She reads. She dreams. She wakes up.

It's normal.

~

There are monsters inside Mako's head. She dreams of drifting, because that way she wouldn't be alone with them.

~

They let the trainees watch the real pilots spar from time to time. Mako sees Stacker at the Academy only once, when she's sixteen and by then she knows how to hold her own in a fight so even though her shins ache from how hard Chuck went after her with escrima sticks, it's enough to know he has matching bruises all over his stomach and arms.

She has never seen Stacker in training gear, barefoot on the bamboo mats in loose gi pants and a black vest. His dog tags catch the low light in the combat room and Mako stands behind a gaggle of first-year trainees, on her tiptoes to have a perfect view as Stacker and Chuck's father take each other apart. Mako can't place the style exactly: it has the fluidity of Muay Thai with the flexibility of jiujitsu and the sparsity of krav maga. The combat room is filled with the sounds of strikes and kicks connecting, Stacker and Hansen's breathing, their feet on the mats and every once in a while the heavy thunk of one of them hitting the floor.

Mako's breath catches and she knows she's flushed, she can feel the heat creeping up her neck and cheeks. She can't tear her eyes away. Hansen is methodical and steady and Stacker _grins_ , the corner of his mouth raised in a challenge that makes electricity pool in Mako's fingertips.

That night she has never been so grateful that the trainees are allowed solitary quarters at the Academy. She shuts the door and leans against it and lets it cool her back.

'Disgusting,' she whispers in the silence of the room, fisting her hands at her sides until the bones creak and her nails biting into her palms send sharp stabs of pain up her arms. Her voice is hoarse and it grates and her skin feels sticky with sweat. 'You're disgusting.'

When bile rises in her throat she runs to the tiny bathroom and locks herself in. She strips out of her uniform and has to clench her teeth to keep from moaning when the fabric drags against her thighs.

She turns on scalding hot water and staggers inside the shower stall, but no water can drown the sound when she starts hitting the wall with her fists until there are bloody imprints left on the tiles and the pain makes her collapse to her knees.

'You're disgusting,' Mako mutters. She shuts her eyes and presses her forehead to the wall where the water is slowly cleaning off the blood. She reaches between her legs.

~

Mr Pentecost drops her off at the boarding school for the first time (she still calls him _Mr Pentecost_ then) and leaves to visit Aunt Tamsin. Mako waits until she's alone in a room she'll be sharing with three strange girls all taller than her, and none of them are American but none of them are Japanese. Mako waits until she's alone to sit on her bed, pull her legs up to her chest and rest her forehead on her knees.

The PPDC is paying for her stay at the boarding school. Mako overheard Mr Pentecost talking to Aunt Tamsin; he had to pull strings to get her in. She hasn't cried since her parents died. She doesn't cry now. She keeps her eyes open wide and prays for the ghost of her grandmother to take her away. She wants to see her parents, but she doesn't want to see them staring at her with unseeing eyes and blood dripping from their mouths.

~

Tamsin dies when Mako is seventeen and Stacker isn't there.

'I'm so sorry, Mako,' Mr Hansen says. He bows respectfully and Mako bows back on automatic.

The funeral is four days later and it rains all through the service. Mako stands next to Stacker and feels as if her face were a mask, stiff and frozen. It's the second time she's lost her family. Before she can stop herself she reaches for Stacker's hand and he squeezes back. He's solid and warm next to Mako, real and alive. When she looks up, it's to see that he tipped back his umbrella so his face is wet with rain, except his eyes are too red for it to be just rain.

None of the words spoken at the funeral, none of the words coiling inside Mako's head, make her cry.

It's the sight of Stacker crying that does it.

They stand at the gravesite long after the service is finished, hand-in-hand.

~

It happens two weeks after Tamsin dies, and of that day Mako will remember every detail: the smell of cordite and sweat in the combat room, the stress headache that has been trailing after her since morning, the constant background noises of a Shatterdome that by now have become as comforting and familiar to Mako as anything ever could. The pouring rain outside. The stack of Mark III Restoration Project paperwork on the desk back in her quarters.

Sounds filter in first when she walks into the combat room, the shuffle of bare feet on bamboo mats and steady but shallow breathing. She knows what she's going to see.

Stacker's vest is damp with sweat and his face is expressionless as he moves between katas with vicious, ruthless precision. After a moment, Mako notices his eyes are closed. She matches their breathing pattern without thinking about it. She toes off her boots and stands at the edge of the mats, waiting for acknowledgement. If Stacker doesn't want her there, she'll leave; but he looks worn out, the twist of his mouth bleak and self-deprecating.

He wasn't there when his best friend and last remaining family save for Mako died, alone in a hospital bed and stripped of all the power and fierceness Mako remembers from those few moments after they defeated Onibaba. The few moments burnt into Mako's memory forever, etched on the insides of her eyelids, overlaying the sight of her parents' corpses.

Stacker finishes, stilling with his back to Mako. She sees him collecting himself: his back going straighter, his fingers clenching and unclenching. When he turns, Mako expects him to have put up a front or a mask — but there is nothing. He's exhausted. He looks —

Mako's breath catches when she realises.

He looks defeated.

She doesn't know what it is that pushes her forward: momentum or gravity. Stacker has always burned so bright at the centre of Mako's universe, fuelling her passion and her anger and the bone-deep need to get revenge. Without him she'd be dead in more ways than one, she would never be where she is today — seventeen and a prodigy, seventeen and the best, seventeen and doomed. He's the fire; he's the _spark_. Mako's footsteps on the bamboo mats are nearly silent, and then she has to tip her head back to keep looking Stacker in the eye.

She won't ever be as tall as him, but one day she wants them to stand on equal footing anyway.

'If I could,' Stacker says in Japanese, 'I would slaughter every kaijuu on the planet, bare-handed, just so you wouldn't ever have to get inside a jaeger.'

The monsters inside Mako's head twitch and coil, a low burn at the back of her consciousness. There is a tightness in the pit of her stomach. She wraps her fingers around Stacker's biceps, though her hands are too small for it to matter.

'I would do the same.'

Stacker lifts the corner of his mouth in a faint smirk, and it sends a shiver down Mako's spine. 'You shouldn't be the one to protect me,' he says.

When Mako was little, she used to reach up to Stacker and when he leaned down, she'd wrap her arms around his neck and hang on as he lifted her. Everything seemed just a little off from high up, a little different in a subtly unsettling way that turned Mako's stomach even as she laughed. She does it now, she reaches up, and Stacker's tired smile gets wider as he obediently leans down to let her embrace him.

Mako doesn't embrace him.

She curls her fingers around the chain of his dog tags and tugs him down the last few inches. She stands on her tiptoes and her heart is in her throat, blood is roaring in her ears, she feels sick and she has to shut her eyes. She presses her mouth to Stacker's, kisses him slow and light and chaste, but nothing about it is light and nothing about it is chaste. He stands frozen, but Mako still feels the warmth of his lips and his skin; she'll dream about it, she knows, it will haunt her.

It will be just another ghost.

Stacker doesn't push her away. He's still, absolutely still save for his heartbeat — Mako feels it when her fingers are pressed to the inside of his elbow, she feels his heartbeat. Time stands still and Stacker stands still and he doesn't push her away.

~

It's easy to pretend it never happened. They don't talk about it.

They —

~

She's fifteen and she listens to Stacker's welcome speech at the Jaeger Academy. In the enormous hall his eyes find her easily and he smiles. Mako's back is ramrod straight and she keeps her eyes fixed ahead. She's the shortest person around and the trainee uniform fits her ill, because she's yet to fill out her shirts. The other girls at the boarding school patted her on the head and laughed, fake and condescending. Mako doesn't expect anything to change.

Out of all of the trainees at the Academy, there are only twenty-three who also take specialisation in tech and jaeger restoration. It means Mako has five hours to sleep at night, but she's at the top of her class. She gets angry and she gets sad; she reads, and she only needs to think about the way Stacker's back looked like in Tokyo when he turned, how wide it was and how blinding the sun reflected on his flight suit. He seemed so tall that day, framed with dust and sunlight and for a moment — for just a moment, brief and overwhelming in its suddenness — Mako felt safe.

That's the thing to remember when she gets angry or sad, when she wakes up and expects her hands to be bloodied up to the forearms, when the Australian boy beats her senseless in the combat room under the pretence of training (Mako doesn't say a word to anyone, even though she can't sleep for three nights because her right side is bruised black and blue. She doesn't cry. She still dreams.)

~

When it's all over, she has lost her family three times: her parents, Tamsin, Stacker. The fire is gone from her wings, the spark extinguished. She wanted revenge, but never thought about what would happen afterwards. Revenge was her bread and water for so many years. It rains all through the service she and Mr Hansen organise for the people lost in the final fight. The Shatterdome is never quiet, but now all voices are hushed. Conversations die down as soon as they're started. Grief hangs heavy and thick in the air.

Out of respect for the other PPDC staff, Mako cleans out her room herself. She doesn't have a lot of things: a diary she stopped writing in when she was seventeen, a stack of photos held together with an elastic band, three pairs of trousers and two sweaters and a skirt she has never worn. She leaves her room clean and empty, ready for whoever might end up here next. Maybe Raleigh; who knows. Mako tries not to think about Raleigh too much.

~

(When she says it, when she says she loves him, her mind is filled with memories.

Her hair is still wet when Raleigh looks at her, different now, and says: 'Look, about you and —'

He says: 'I can keep a secret.'

When the time comes Mako does the one thing Stacker couldn't; she pushes Raleigh away.)

~

She doesn't leave a letter. There is nothing to say.

~

The world is free of monsters, and once again Mako is alone with the monsters inside her head.

How long will she last?

(Not long.)


End file.
